07 April 2011

Wrecked

Directed by: Michael GreenspanWritten by: Christopher Dodd

Trapping a character in one place is a challenge for so mobile a medium as movies. Danny Boyle met it recently with kinetic frenzy, swamping 127 Hours' pinned protagonist with flashbacks, fantasies and videocam confessions. In Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, Ryan Reynolds awakes in a coffin with nothing but a lighter, a cell phone, and a high-stakes kidnapping mystery to solve; the movie overcomes its formal limitations with narrative urgency. In contrast, the first 30 minutes of Wrecked, a near-dialogueless anti-thriller directed by Michael Greenspan, sport no such bourgeois trappings as excitement or exigency: a bloody Adrien Brody wakes up in a totaled car, his leg caught under the dash, his head addled with amnesia. He cries. He mutters. He moans. He has a dream—about being stuck in the same car, in the same stretch of woods.

OK, so eventually a mystery emerges for him to sort out, but its stakes don't readily reveal themselves...